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Thursday, October 20, 2011

Pat Buchanan continues to preach racism. MSNBC still refuses to fire him

Pat Buchanan: Minorities Aren't "Bad For The Country," But...

October 18, 2011 3:31 pm ET by Solange Uwimana

Pat
Buchanan doesn't think "minorities are bad for the country." At least that's
what he claimed last night on Fox News. In
an interview with Sean Hannity to discuss his new book, Suicide of a
Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, Buchanan expanded on part of the
book's premise, that America is "disintegrating" because "white America is an
endangered species." Though he claimed that
minorities aren't "bad for the country," the America of 2041 Buchanan sketched
is one that is bankrupt economically, confounded by crime and lawlessness, and where
English is a second language.
Here
is Buchanan trying to explain the main points in the chapter of his book
titled, "The End of White America":

HANNITY: I want you to explain it in your
words 'cause I think people will interpret it, Pat -- is that, oh, so white
America's going, so that means the end of America? Are you saying that
minorities are bad for the country.
BUCHANAN: No, not at all. No, not at all. But
the title is taken from the title of an article, cover article in Atlantic
Magazine, exactly, "The End Of White America." What does it mean -- and the
fellow wrote it about what does it mean for the culture? And so, I looked at it
from what does it mean for the United States of America when white Americans in
2041 become a minority in the country along with Asians-American minority,
African-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans. And you try to envisualize what's
going to happen. And America's gonna look very much like California right now.
And what does that mean?
California is bankrupt. It's bond rating is
the lowest of any place. Los Angeles, half the people there don't speak English
as -- in their own homes -- 5 million people. And you've got all the problems
of crimes. You've got a black-brown war among the underclass, as one sheriff described
it, in the prisons and in the gangs. And people are leaving California. And
it's the old tax consumers are coming in.
Now, these are not bad or evil people. Even
the ones who are illegal. They're coming to work, many of them. They're coming
for a better life. But the truth is they are bankrupting the state of
California because of that divide you mentioned between taxpayers and tax
consumers. And what happens when all of America is like that, when every
American city is like LA?

Buchanan
added: "What California is today, America is in 2041 if we don't change
course."

How else would one interpret those words if not:
"[M]inorities are bad for the country" unless there are more white people?
Indeed,
Buchanan goes even further later in the discussion, complaining:

BUCHANAN: Republicans can't win California
today. It's not because the people are evil, but they are Democratic. They
depend on government. They believe in government, and they vote for the party
of government. When Texas goes the same way -- and whites are a minority in
Texas -- when it becomes predominantly overwhelmingly Hispanic, it is going to
become predominantly Democratic. That's the end of the Republican Party.

Buchanan
concluded by suggesting "a moratorium on immigration." There's no clearer
indication of what Buchanan thinks of minorities and immigrants than his
remarks to Sean Hannity.
Buchanan has a long history of bigotry. He has been warning
that America will become "a
Third World country" since at least 1990 when he warned about the
"Euro-Americans ... who founded the United States" becoming the minority.
And
his call to end all immigration is something Buchanan has been calling for, for
years, as well. In his 2006 book, State of Emergency, for example,
Buchanan wrote:

"This
[immigration] is an invasion, the greatest invasion in history." [p.
5]

"We
are witnessing how nations perish. We are entered upon the final act of
our civilization. The last scene is the deconstruction of the nations. The
penultimate scene, now well underway, is the invasion unresisted."
[p. 6]

"The
first imperative is an immediate moratorium on all immigration, such as
the one we imposed from 1924 to 1965. ... But even with a moratorium,
success is not assured." [p. 250-251]

During
the Fox News discussion, Buchanan said he named "The End of White America"
chapter of his book after an Atlantic Magazine article. But the author of the Atlantic
article of the same name arrived at a conclusion that was the exact opposite of
Buchanan's. In the January/February 2009 issue of the magazine, Vassar College
English professor Hua Hsu wrote:

This vision of the aggrieved white man lost
in a world that no longer values him was given its most vivid expression in the
1993 film Falling Down. Michael Douglas plays Bill Foster, a downsized
defense worker with a buzz cut and a pocket protector who rampages through a
Los Angeles overrun by greedy Korean shop-owners and Hispanic gangsters,
railing against the eclipse of the America he used to know. (The film came out
just eight years before California became the nation's first majority-minority
state.) Falling Down ends with a soulful police officer apprehending
Foster on the Santa Monica Pier, at which point the middle-class vigilante
asks, almost innocently: "I'm the bad guy?"
BUT THIS IS a nightmare vision. Of course
most of America's Bill Fosters aren't the bad guys--just as civilization is not,
in the words of Tom Buchanan, "going to pieces" and America is not, in the
phrasing of Pat Buchanan, going "Third World." The coming white minority does
not mean that the racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become
inverted, as in 1995's White Man's Burden, an awful thought experiment
of a film, starring John Travolta, that envisions an upside-down world in which
whites are subjugated to their high-class black oppressors. There will be
dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the
next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone's
lives, producing a culture that's more likely than any before to treat its
inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.

Hsu
concluded:

[W]e aspire to be post-racial, but we still
live within the structures of privilege, injustice, and racial categorization
that we inherited from an older order. We can talk about defining ourselves by
lifestyle rather than skin color, but our lifestyle choices are still racially
coded. We know, more or less, that race is a fiction that often does more harm
than good, and yet it is something we cling to without fully understanding why
-- as a social and legal fact, a vague sense of belonging and place that we
make solid through culture and speech.
But maybe this is merely how it used to be --
maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things. "You have a lot of
young adults going into a more diverse world," Carter remarks. For the young
Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart
and remade in their own image. "We came along in a generation that didn't have
to follow that path of race," he goes on. "We saw something different." This
moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was
a bridge, and we crossed it.

Pat Buchanan: Blacks Have Lost The American Identity They Had During Segregation

October 19, 2011 6:11 pm ET by Eric Hananoki

During a radio appearance promoting
his book, MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan argued that blacks and whites were
more unified during the 1950s than they are today. Buchanan argued that "what
we had then, which was a sense of cultural and social one-ness, we were
a people, that I think that is what's being lost." Buchanan added that
while blacks considered themselves Americans first and foremost during
the era of segregation, today they're using "hyphenated terms" like "African-American" to describe themselves.
Buchanan's
remark came yesterday on the radio program of Mark Davis. Davis
asked Buchanan to expand on his theory that, in Davis' words, "black
Americans of 1960 were more woven into the fabric of the America of
that time than many of today's black Americans are woven into the
America of this time."
Buchanan replied that during the 1950s, blacks and whites "all had a common religion, we all worshiped the same God,
we all went to schools where American literature was taught, the
English language was our language, we all rooted for the same teams, we
read the same newspapers, we listened to the same music. We were a
people then. We were all Americans. Now I'm not saying segregation was
good. But what I was saying, that did not prevent us from being one
people."
Buchanan then said that blacks today have lost the American identity they had in the 1950s:

BUCHANAN: If you'd ask
those black folks that are traveling abroad, "Who are you," "I am an
American." That was their first identity in my judgment at that time.
Clearly they were African-Americans, but we didn't use hyphenated terms
in those days. And so I think what we had then, which was a sense of
cultural and social one-ness, we were a people, that I think that is
what's being lost. Across the divide now, people are calling names,
they're not communicating, and I think it's really a tragedy and it
could be a disaster for this country.

Buchanan painted a similar picture of the 1940s and 1950s in his 1988 book Right From The Beginning. In his chapter "Then and Now: A Tale of Two Cities," Buchanan wrote of his upbringing in segregated Washington D.C.:

Any resemblance between this cosmopolitan capital and the
sleepy Southern city where we grew up is coincidental. Segregation was a way of
life in postwar Washington, but, unlike parts of the Eastern Shore of Maryland,
which were little slices of Mississippi, Washington never belonged to the "mean
South." The only genuine "racist" I ever knew was the father of a
grammar-school classmate, a red-faced, black-haired Irishman who kept a rack of rifles and shotguns in his
dining room, and talked incessantly of "the niggers." His wife and kids,
however, were the nicest of people, polar opposites.
Over the years, I have come to agree with a friend that "racism
is an obsessive preoccupation with the subject of race. The racist sees
everything in life, education and politics, from the standpoint of race.
His
viewpoint on everything is pervaded by his obsession." By that
definition,
racism is as prevalent in black America today as in white America. In
the late 1940s and early '50s, however, race was never a preoccupation
with us; we rarely
thought about it.
There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every
slight. The "Negroes" of Washington had their public schools, restaurants,
bars, movie houses, playgrounds, and churches; and we had ours. Neither
community could have been called rich.
We had no right to vote, when I was growing up, no
elections. We were governed by three "commissioners," appointed by the
President, and governed well. One of them, Walter Tobriner, was my father's
good friend; he didn't need a limousine, but drove to work in his own car. The
white public schools were run by one appointed commissioner, the black schools
by another. And the schools ran well; the best of them were the equal of the
Catholic schools.
[...]
In the 1950s, there were no food stamps or Medicaid payments
or rent supplements. The relief agencies were the churches. But no one starved;
no "homeless" froze to death, and no shake-down artist extorted millions out of
the White House by threatening to starve himself to death; and everyone worked.
Black teenage unemployment was 9 percent in 1948, today, it runs between 35 and
50 percent.
In 1950, the same bus that was jammed with white-collar
workers in their snap-brim hats coming south from Kensington to Chevy Chase
Circle, to catch the L-4 downtown, carried the "maids," the black cleaning
ladies, back out to Kensington to work all day in the houses the white men had
left an hour before. When it snowed, the kids at Blessed Sacrament would gather
at the circle and barrage the "Boston Blackie" with snow balls as it rolled by,
heading north out the two-lane road that was Connecticut Avenue. The white
driver was always more outraged than his passengers, who laughed at the
diversion from the day's drudgery provided by the little white boys.
Now the cleaning ladies in the affluent suburbs of
Washington are Korean and Mexican and Salvadorean, and tens of thousands of Washington's
black women and their children are second- and third-generation welfare
clients. Supposedly, they are better off.

Buchanan, who just released his new book Suicide Of A Superpower, has a long history of bigotry and hostility toward minorities.
From the October 18 edition of WPAB's The Mark Davis Show:

DAVIS:
There's a statement you made maybe three or four books back that I've
quoted so much, so often, always with credit, because it makes people's
eyebrows go way up, but they need to pause and understand it, and that
is that the African-Americans,
the black Americans of pre-Civil Rights Act America -- I mean, yes, it,
was a country that had colored water fountains, and nobody is looking to
go back to that, but the black Americans of 1960 were more woven into
the fabric of the America of that time than many of today's black
Americans are woven into the America of this time. What do you make of
that?
BUCHANAN: You know, that's -- let me tell you, I grew up in Washington, D.C. I was in high school when Brown vs. The Board Of Education
came down and I remember before it came down we had one black player on
our football team, a Catholic team, and public high schools wouldn't
play us. And we had to go up to Pennsylvania on these back roads and
find teams that would play our school.
But you are right. In the 1950s, for example, Washington, D.C.,
was a segregated town. It wasn't Birmingham, Alabama, but it was
segregated, clear and simple. But we all had a common religion, we all
worshiped the same god, we all went to schools where American literature
was taught, the English language was our language, we all rooted for
the same teams, we read the same newspapers, we listened to the same
music. We were a people then. We were all Americans.
Now
I'm not saying segregation was good. But what I was saying, that did
not prevent us from being one people. If you'd ask those black folks
that are traveling abroad, "Who are you?" "I am an American." That was
their first identity in my judgment at that time. Clearly they were
African-Americans, but we
didn't use hyphenated terms in those days. And so I think that what we
had then, which was a sense of cultural and social one-ness, we were a
people, that I think that is what is
being lost. Across the divide now, people are calling names, they're
not communicating, and I think it's really a tragedy and it could be a
disaster for this country.